D-Link, Airespace Develop 'Lightweight' Access Point

D-Link, which has been primarily focused on the SMB market, sees an opportunity to move into the enterprise segment by embracing the LWAPP draft, which is now being considered by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

"It's opening up the whole enterprise space in terms of management, security and interoperability," said Keith Karlsen, executive vice president at D-Link, Fountain Valley, Calif. "We think LWAPP is going to be the emerging standard."

San Jose, Calif.-based Airespace--one of the original supporters of LWAPP, along with Intel, Symbol Technologies and others--said the protocol essentially creates a USB-like environment for WLAN access points and network controllers. LWAPP also would establish a standard, interoperable way for different WLAN switches or controllers to interact with so-called thin access points. That, in turn, would enable automation of many access points by creating a central way to handle air traffic, such as radio-frequency management, authentication and IEEE 802.1x security.

As part of the partnership, Karlsen said D-Link's LWAPP access point would work with the Airespace 4000 WLAN Switch, Airespace 4100 WLAN Appliance and any other WLAN controller supporting LWAPP. D-Link said it expects to release the new access point in the second quarter.

Oli Thordarson, president of Alvaka Networks, a Huntington Beach, Calif.-based managed service provider, said many of his clients have experienced difficulty in managing a variety of wireless access points, which were brought in by employees or installed by IT staff. As a result, Thordarson said he's a big proponent of industry standards that make it easier to manage wireless networks made up of disparate parts, and LWAPP appears to be gaining traction in the market.

"The wireless security and management solutions I've seen to date are third-party add-on or ad hoc things that have limited integration and compatibility," Thordarson said. "It will be interesting to see where the market goes, but I think [LWAPP] is a big plus for some larger LAN installations."

Meanwhile, WLAN infrastructure market leader Cisco Systems supports the so-called fat access point WLAN model, in which the access points hold the intelligence to handle traffic such as authentication and radio-frequency management. At the same time, WLAN switch vendor, Aruba Wireless Networks, supports its own thin access points and switching system designed to be layered with, for instance, Cisco's wired infrastructure.

Both Cisco and Aruba have said clearer definitions of what features should be included in an wireless access point and what features should be included in a network controller, or switch, should be established before a new standard is ratified and before new products based on emerging standards are released.

Aruba CEO Don LeBeau, a former senior vice president at Cisco, said he believes that Cisco's wired network and Structured Wireless-Aware Network Framework is the best kind of transport for what wireless manufacturers, such as Aruba, are working to build.

"Wireless technology is not disrupting what we did in the past," LeBeau said. "We fundamentally believe that it's an overlay environment, not just an extension of the wired network."

Cisco's proprietary approach to WLAN management and security, however, has been criticized by wireless open-standards supporters. To counter that image and address some limitations with its Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP), Cisco submitted a draft on a new, open WLAN security solution to the IETF.

Dubbed EAP-FAST (Extensible Authentication Protocol, Flexible Authentication via Secure Tunneling), the solution is designed as an alternative to address limitations in Cisco's proprietary LEAP, which is included in the IEEE's developing 802.1x security standard for network authentication.

Chris Bolinger, manager of product marketing for Cisco's wireless networking business unit, said EAP-FAST aims to provide simple, flexible deployment, management and support for various user and password database types.